Thursday, May 31, 2012

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is on the verge of taking serious aim at sugary drinks, as he wants to ban such beverages larger than 16 fluid ounces from nearly all dining establishments in the city.
The city’s proposed ban on sugary drinks would apply to service in nearly all restaurants, movie theaters and street food carts and it is part of a Health Department aim to reduce obesity.
The ban, which if approved would be the first of its kind in the nation, would take affect in March 2013.
Diet sodas, fruit juices, dairy-based beverages like milkshakes and alcohol would be exempt from the ban and it would not affect sales in supermarkets or bodegas.
However, corner stores and all other establishments that receive a letter grade on food service from the Health Department would have to follow the ban.
The Health Department is not seeking City Council approval to move forward with this plan, but the city's Board of Health would have to sign off on it, something that is considered a foregone conclusion.
The New York City Beverage Association was already fighting back Wednesday. A spokesman for the group says in a statement, “There they go again. The New York City Health Department’s unhealthy obsession with attacking soft drinks is again pushing them over the top. The city is not going to address the obesity issue by attacking soda because soda is not driving the obesity rates. It’s time for serious health professionals to move on and seek solutions that are going to actually curb obesity

You gotta wonder what it is exactly that this control freak thinks he's getting out of this, other than making it harder for business to survive in a government controlled environment.
Lets look at this another way, so these drinks can only be purchased in 16 ounces or less, what's to keep someone from buying 2 then?
So what's next?
Bloomberg gonna put a limit on how many can be purchased at a time?
If people didn't want super sized drinks then they wouldn't buy them, it's that simple and one of the reasons that businesses are hurting is government telling them what lawful products they can or cannot sell.
Bloomberg wants to fight obesity he can pay for an education campaign, the way not to do it is to regulate small business into the ground.

Watch out, you ladies at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith: Those feet under the stall next to you might just belong to a 38-year-old man.
Despite opposition from female students, UAFS has decided on “advice of counsel” to allow a 38-year-old anatomically-male, transgendered student access to the women’s bathrooms on campus.
According to a report from the conservative Campus Reform, the university decided to reverse its transgender policy after receiving a letter from the Department of Justice. The school’s initial solution was to allow the man to use gender-neutral bathrooms instead of the women’s restrooms, and to offer to convert more bathrooms into gender-neutral areas.
“Because of the stance we took, the individual filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice,” Mark Horn, vice president of university relations, told Campus Reform.
Jennifer Braly, the 38-year-old male student who was not satisfied with the university’s policy, filed a complaint with the Justice Department and sued.“I am frustrated and highly depressed about all of these unfair restrictions,” Braly explained in an online appeal for sex-change surgery donations. “I live as a woman full time and have been for a year and a half now. I have natural breast development bigger than some normal girls from the hormone treatment. The only thing restricting me is what’s between my legs. Everyone is so concerned with what’s between my legs. I am just as much woman as anyone else.”

This is all "Despite opposition from female students", sorry pal, mutilating yourself don't make you a woman no matter how frustrated you are.
Seems a lot of these colleges forget where the majority of the money they get comes from, there's a lot of fathers out there who really don't want their daughters using the restroom with a 38 year old man, that's what we're talking about here.

There's really no point in making a federal case out of this, no one has restricted this "gentleman" from using the facilities designated for those with his genitalia. This isn't about "acceptance", it's about forcing oneself on others.
Maybe it's time to start choking off the income from these Universities?

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Mars Inc., the manufacturer of Snickers, is phasing out chocolate products that exceed 250 calories per portion as part of an agreement with Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA). Founded in 2010 in conjunction with the Let’s Move! program, First Lady Michelle Obama’s government initiative aimed at shaping up the nation’s youth, PHA has a mandate to “monitor and publicly report on the progress” of partners such as Mars and, more generally, to “make the healthy choice the easy choice.”

You know, I don't eat a Snickers bar very often, and I used to be able to decide for myself just how big my craving for one was and buy accordingly.
Just like when I eat ice cream, when I want ice cream I want real cream and real chocolatewith real whipped cream, that's the whole idea. To be able to occasionally indulge myself with a treat that is everything I imagine it to be.
But these choices are slowly being taken away from me....from us.
Maybe it might seem minor, but it seems like almost everyday there is some "minor" thing government is sticking it's big nose into.
So the result of all this is that eventually the government is going to own all of our liberties, where we'll lose the abilty to decide what to eat, where to go,what we can or cannot do to eventually telling us who to vote for.

You can't have just a little freedom, it's all or nothing, and one of the worst reasons to take it away is "for your own good".
Adults can decide for themselves and their families and I for one am not ready to abdicate my ability to choose to the almighty government and their petty little minions.

A study commissioned by Sen. Tom Coburn is casting doubt on whether taxpayers' $18 billion annual investment in federal jobs training programs is paying off.
"The vast majority of money we spend in job training doesn't go to job training, it goes to employ people in those job training federal programs," Coburn told Fox News.
The 2011 Government Accountability Office study he commissioned, which examined programs in fiscal year 2009, found an overlapping and duplicative maze of 47 federal jobs programs run by nine agencies. Some were rife with mismanagement, waste, fraud, abuse and corruption.
The study found:

Some job training participants spent their days sitting on a bus.

Some were trained for jobs that didn't exist.

Others were paid to sit through educational sessions about jobs they already had.

High school students were knowingly exposed to the cancer-causing agent asbestos as part of a job training program.

Funds were misspent to pay a contractor for ghost employees and to purchase video games.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

You know I'm all for weening people off the government teat, especially if government gets out of the way of the private sector and let them innovate and create jobs.
There will always be the poor among us and with a healthy economy very few have a problem with giving them a hand through limited government assistance and charitable giving.
But in this economy there is just something unsettling about these 2 stories.

Not bad for government work.
A new in-depth database of federal worker salaries shows the government paid out a whopping $105 billion in salaries last year for most of its civilian workforce -- to boot, the workers got $439 million in bonuses.
The information, which was obtained and number-crunched by The Asbury Park Press through a Freedom of Information Act request, challenges the old notion that government workers trade high salaries for job security and benefits.
In fact, many workers get all those things.
"They get better pay and they especially get better benefits," said James Sherk, senior policy analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The database, which is now online, allows users to enter a federal worker's name and their department, and then look up their salary information. The trove covers about 70 percent of federal workers, with some eye-opening results.
The average salary, for instance, for New Jersey's federal employees was $83,749. Many senior executives throughout the federal government make a six-figure salary.
Attorney General Eric Holder makes $199,700 - like other Cabinet-level officials. And Jeff Neely, the suspended General Services Administration employee at the heart of the Las Vegas convention scandal, was pulling in $172,000.
The database also shows the government has been liberally handing out bonuses, with many in the ten-of-thousands-of-dollars range. The top bonus in the Justice Department was $37,505.
In the Agriculture Department, it was $62,895. Some of the biggest bonuses, though, were the product of a special presidential award program.

Not really to surprising from an overgrown, bloated, pompous bureaucracy run by professional elitist unions who's sole purpose is to milk the taxpayers dry in exchange for slipshod service to the people who pay their salaries.

Some 22 million children who depend on the federal nutrition assistance program that replaced food stamps could lose their benefits under a 2013 budget resolution recently approved by the House Agricultural Committee. The budget, approved in April, would cut more than $33 billion over the next 10 years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Approximately one third of the proposed cuts are directed at “categorical eligibility” restrictions that could leave as many as two million people per year ineligible for SNAP benefits. The proposed bill would also eliminate more than 250,000 children from automatic enrollment in the Free School Lunch and Breakfast Program. Their benefits could vanish as early as this year if the budget is passed.
According to Center for American Progress data, the proposed budget could end up affecting as many as 46 million Americans. Families of four currently enrolled in the SNAP program could lose about 11 percent of their total monthly benefits.

OK, so we're hemorrhaging money in this country, the deficit is frightening and leaving our childrens children in debt throughout their entire lives and I understand that we have to start tightening our belts somewhere.
But come on, why is it that government workers get a windfall while everyone else is expected to suck it up and sacrifice for the common good?

There's a class war going on alright, the government against the rest of America, we need to vote all the dems and squishy republicans out of office and get back to some sanity.
If belt tightening is required then it needs to start with government workers first then the rest of the way down. Being a federal employee shouldn't make you immune from the bad decisions of your bosses, and there's no doubt we made a bad decision when Obama was voted into office.

Bill Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s goal of hiking taxes on the rich alone is not enough to solve the country’s fiscal woes and suggested that middle class Americans must also eventually contribute more.
Clinton, who discussed a number of economic and political issues at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s third annual Fiscal Summit in Washington, D.C., prefaced his comments with the warning that he was giving his personal view and was “not speaking for the White House.”

“This is just me now, I’m not speaking for the White House — I think you could tax me at a 100 percent and you wouldn’t balance the budget,” said Clinton, who has earned tens of millions of dollars since leaving office. “We are all going to have to contribute to this, and if middle class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth to the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates [from] when I was president” - before the Bush tax cuts.

It's always about the government wanting more money, never about the the way they piss it away on frivolous stuff.
Also, how come when they talk about budget cuts it's always the seniors, the military, emergency services, education and other essential services that are threatened?
They never talk about defunding stuff like the CPB or National endowment for the arts or even the vast bloated, bureaucracy of soulless civil servants who lord their petty little positions over the people who are forced by the rule of law to pay for their over sized salaries.
Hey Bill!
The problem isn't that the government ain't got enough money, it's that they're to irresponsible to be in control of it.

Just two weeks ago, the battle for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska was between state Attorney General Jim Bruning and state Treasurer Don Stenburg. Neither inspired the growing base of conservative voters. They were, to be charitable, standard conservative-ish career politicians. Mama Grizzly Sarah Palin shook up the race with a late endorsement of state Senator Debby Fischer. It made all the difference. I follow politics very closely, yet I hadn't heard of the Fischer candidacy until Palin's endorsement. National tea party groups like FreedomWorks had put all their resources behind Stenburg, with nary a thought about Fischer. A good reminder that these groups aren't as plugged into the grassroots as they like to claim.
A wind of change is blowing through the nation. Fischer's nomination tells us that voters are rejecting the tired 'politics as usual' messaging of most candidates. Be fearless. Have courage. Stand for something.

A "wind of change indeed", no one believed that this candidate had a chance, she was ignored by the established RINO power brokers of the republican party and left with minuscule resources until Sarah Palin mentioned her name.
The conservatives then rejected the squishy offering of the spineless GOP and made a choice for change.
If the republicans want to hold influence then they are the ones who need to evolve.

Monday, May 14, 2012

You know George H.W. Bush made the statement "Read my lips: no new taxes" and he was slammed for 4 years for raising taxes and lost his second term to Billy "BJ" Clinton.
Even though liberals live for higher taxes he was vilified for making the promise and then backing off of it.....and this was before the popularity of the Internet.

Funny thing is that no one in the media seems to remember the multitude of promises made by the Obamessiah.
﻿

Just a little reminder here

﻿Fortunately we have the Internet,and if the media isn't going to cover the broken promises then they'll be plastered all over online.
No budget in 1,111 days, 8.1% unemployment and massive deficits is what we got.

After the presidential campaign has been focusing on female reproductive rights and other women's issues, President Barack Obama is coming to the city Monday to deliver the commencement address at all-female Barnard College and attend two high-profile fundraisers.
Arriving in the city late Monday morning, the president is slated to deliver the commencement address before 600 Barnard graduates at 1 p.m.
The original scheduled speaker, New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, agreed to step aside to allow the president to headline the event.
While both Democrats and Republicans have recently debated on the campaign trail a women's right to choose and issues concerning working women, one of the scheduled student speakers at the commencement, Jessica Blank, told NY1 she hoped the president would also address the economy in his speech.

I hope he addresses the economy too, unemployment and the underemployed in this country remains at absymal highs with people dropping out of the employment market altogether.
I'm glad that a few groups now have a president more interested in their concerns than the concerns of all Americans who are suffering in this job market.
They now have a president who is more interested in prioritizing their issues than fixing the economy, sending a budget to congress, reducing our debt or getting out of the way of job creators to get this economy growing.
Yup, glad Obama has his priorities straight.

The voters will decide in November if these distractions are worth their support.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

There's not a thing in this video that's not true and no reason in the world to think it will get any better in four more years.
Can we really afford four more years of high energy prices, record deficits or lackluster employment?

Friday, May 4, 2012

When I was really young there was a quaint little ritual we would all do on a Sunday afternoon (before and after football season).
All of us kids would crowd into the car and the whole family would take a Sunday drive.
Sometimes we would picnic, sometimes not, sometimes we would go somewhere specific and sometimes my Dad would just go in a direction just to see what was there.

The point is that we had the freedom to get in the car and go wherever we wished.

And you thought it was expensive to just buy a car these days.
The average cost to operate a vehicle in the United States is now $8,946 annually, according to the 2012 edition of AAA’s Your Driving Costs study.
That’s an increase of 1.9 percent over 2011 and encompasses the full cost of ownership, including fuel, maintenance and tire wear among other factors.
And it could already be a lot more than that.
Increases were seen almost across the board with fuel prices experiencing the biggest single jump at 14.8 percent. But that figure was calculated using a fourth quarter 2011 average price of 3.36 cents per gallon, which has risen dramatically this year.
Fuel was followed by tire costs, which rose 4.9 percent, and insurance, up 3.4 percent year over year.
The only bright spot for car owners was a decrease in the rate of depreciation of their vehicles by 4.9 percent due mainly to low auto sales over the past few years, a trend that is already reversing.
Overall, a typical driver can expect to spend 59.6 cents per mile this year. That compares to just 9 cents per mile when the study was first conducted in 1950, when the average price of a new car was about $1,500.

Freedom is relative, it's not just about constitutional freedoms it's also about the right to go where you want when you want, oh yeah of course if you can afford the high cost of car ownership, maintenance and gasoline then you're still free to do so.
But there used to be a time when you didn't have to have a trust fund to enjoy the open road.
The more government has interfered in the free market the more expensive it's become to have the simple freedom that was enjoyed once by the middle class.

“14.5 percent”
-- U.S. unemployment rate in April including those who have given up looking for work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The U.S. economy added a sickly 115,000 jobs in April, but as discouraged workers continued to leave the labor force, the benchmark unemployment rate nudged down from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent.
The more important number, the size of the potential labor force that is not employed, remained at a crushing 14.5 percent. Economists are alarmed not only at the puny jobs number in April but at the fact that the difference between the two figures, 6.4 percent, stands near an all-time high.

Having 6.4 percent of the nation’s employable adults out of economic circulation is big trouble. For older adults in that category, they may never be able to return to work. For younger adults, it means a lifetime of lower wages and slower advancement if they eventually get back in the hunt and find a job.
In April, about 522,000 Americans left the labor force, making the addition of 115,000 jobs look all the more alarming. In 2011, about 2.7 million Americans left the work force while only 945,000 came in.
This is similar to what Europe, which has alternated between recession and stagnation for a decade, has experienced. Long-term unemployment begets permanent unemployment. Permanent unemployment begets lower economic output, higher welfare costs and eliminates hopes for more rapid growth.

Obama must not be to concerned about it though cause he's got time to host another concert.

Occupy Wall Street organizer Harrison Schultz was on with Hannity tonight. Harrison blamed the New York Police Department for the rapes and violence at the #OWS Zuccotti Park camp.

It's funny how these guys aren't responsible for anything that happens, it's always got to be some kind of deep dark conspiracy.
Libtards and Paultards, neither are accountable for any of their actions. No wonder they all support Obama.

I wasn't all that enthused about Newt either but truth be told I preferred him over Romney. In an election year where the rallying cry will be "Please God, anybody but Obama" we're just going to have to get behind Mitt and vote this failed administration out of office.
Fortunately we haven't been driven over the edge quite yet and are ready to vote in a crazy old libertarian, in spite of Ron Paul's rabid paranoid, 9/11 trooother brigade.

These poor misguided losers just can't get it that the American public just won't accept their loonie candidate. Why should we?
I've seen Paul's supporters advocate some of the most asinine conspiracies out there on the web, from chemtrails to 9/11 trutherism and everything in between.

They know as well as anyone else that this will be their last shot so they're going to try and go for all the marbles, obstructing and interfering in any way to get attention.

Hopefully after this election they'll all skulk back to their conspiracy forums where they can discuss the moon landing hoax, leaving the rest of America to get back to the business of limited government and prosperity.
We didn't lose those things over night and we won't instantly get them back by electing an old crank.

Here's a video put together by the Romney campaign that puts some perspective on the forgotten men/women" in America.
All the other "accomplishments" of this administration pale in comparison to these facts.
Can we really afford to go "Forward"?

President Obama faced mounting criticism Tuesday for allegedly politicizing the anniversary of Usama bin Laden's death, with Sen. John McCain scolding the commander in chief and former New York Gov. George Pataki going so far as to call on Obama to apologize.
The president on Tuesday, in a surprise announcement, arrived in Afghanistan for a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a visit with U.S. troops and later a speech to the nation. Bin Laden's death is expected to come up in that speech, though it is not expected to be the focal point.
The trip comes as the criticism of his handling of the anniversary heats up. Earlier, current and former Navy SEALs reportedly had criticized the president for using the elite unit's deeds as "ammunition" in his reelection bid.
"You know the thing about heroes? They don't brag," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Obama's rival in the 2008 election, told Fox News.
The Obama campaign touched off the heated debate over the historic raid with a web video Friday that touted Obama's decision-making prowess in approving the mission, and questioned whether Mitt Romney would have done the same.

Of course he's facing mounting criticism for bragging about what any leader with half a brain would do, even Jimmy Carter would have awaken from his malaise long enough to order the raid.
I'm glad bin Laden is dead too and have the utmost respect for our warriors who were actually there and did their duty.
But face it, this is one of the things he can do in an election year to deflect attention away from the soaring deficit, the dismal employment prospects, the weak and fragile economy.

The mainstream media is in his pocket also with wall to wall coverage of the destructive tendencies of the occupy crowd.

Peaceful....these are the people who want to destroy capitalism and kill and then eat the 1%, no matter who they have to murder to do so.
But if the media focus their attention on and lionize the anarchists then they don't have to hold Obama and the democrats accountable for their miserable record on the economy and record deficits.

I don't know about the rest of you but he can tout his "gutsy call" all he wants, I ain't buying it, there's way to much for Obama to be accountable for and if the media won't do to him what they'd be happy to do to any other politician (except democrats) then the American people need to hold him to task for his record in November.
I hold no illusions that politicians or the press will give a damn what the masses think if Obama and the democrats are sent packing.
But it will make them a little more cautious before they try and bamboozle us the next time.

So, I ran across this clueless rant by has been "Horror Writer" Stephen King.
The best stuff ever published by him was when he was a struggling writer and had editors that would reign back his excessively verbose bullshit and hold it to a concise and compelling story.

Now he's so full of himself that he tells publishers what they'll publish.
Which is why I haven't liked a book by him since the original "the Stand".
Everything after has been tedious and boring......I fall asleep before I get to the point of his sentences.

Of course now that he thinks he's all that as a writer he obviously thinks he's qualified to determine tax policy.

Chris Christie may be fat, but he ain’t Santa Claus. In fact, he seems unable to decide if he is New Jersey’s governor or its caporegime, and it may be a comment on the coarsening of American discourse that his brash rudeness is often taken for charm. In February, while discussing New Jersey’s newly amended income-tax law, which allows the rich to pay less (proportionally) than the middle class, Christie was asked about Warren Buffett’s observation that he paid less federal income taxes than his personal secretary, and that wasn’t fair. “He should just write a check and shut up,” Christie responded, with his typical verve. “I’m tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check—go ahead and write it.”

Heard it all before. At a rally in Florida (to support collective bargaining and to express the socialist view that firing teachers with experience was sort of a bad idea), I pointed out that I was paying taxes of roughly 28 percent on my income. My question was, “How come I’m not paying 50?” The governor of New Jersey did not respond to this radical idea, possibly being too busy at the all-you-can-eat cheese buffet at Applebee’s in Jersey City, but plenty of other people of the Christie persuasion did.
Cut a check and shut up, they said.
If you want to pay more, pay more, they said.
Tired of hearing about it, they said.
Tough shit for you guys, because I’m not tired of talking about it. I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar. It’s true that some rich folks put at least some of their tax savings into charitable contributions. My wife and I give away roughly $4 million a year to libraries, local fire departments that need updated lifesaving equipment (Jaws of Life tools are always a popular request), schools, and a scattering of organizations that underwrite the arts. Warren Buffett does the same; so does Bill Gates; so does Steven Spielberg; so do the Koch brothers; so did the late Steve Jobs. All fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.

What a jerk right?
And there's more of that kind of condescending, talk down to the ignorant masses kind of rhetoric.
Which just shows how clueless Stephen King, the bloated hack writer, truly is.

He doesn't realize what the majority of conservatives already know....to the government being wealthy is a relative concept.
While King sits there at his keyboard spewing righteous indignation over the fact that he feels he and others aren't robbed by the government enough the rest of us know what the real score is.
After "Uncle Sugar" sucks the life out of the rich he'll set his sights on the almost rich, then the well to do after which the "comfortable" get the democrats attention and then they'll seize everyones "disposable" income.

You see Stephen, it isn't about the fact that the government doesn't have enough money, it's about the fact that they piss it away and then demand more.
If you're willing to allow them to do that to your labor, effort and intellect then obviously you don't think much of your work.
So why should any of the rest of us?